Review of Alli Simone Defeo’s i love you here’s a gigantic worm
alli simone defeo’s debut book for 2Fast2House i love you here’sa gigantic worm (hereafter gigantic worm) contains an abundance of substance, beauty, and embodiment. These three qualities have often been associated with the earth, and defeo doesn’tshy away from the association, but in their poetry the people have such a close kinship with the earth that the distinction blurs a bit. This is not to say that 1) we don’t retain our individuality, or that 2) nature overtakes our personhood, but instead it’s saying there’s a somehow non-utopian ultimate connection we can feel to the earth and to those around us. Indefeo’s poetry, it takes the form of care.
The content in each individual poem is jam-packed up towards the top of the page, lending these lean poems a sense of loving urgency and immediacy. Like Erin Taylor’s poems, they have some very emotionally significant truths to share with and give to the reader, except defeo’s poetry in gigantic worm exists in a space of shared identity with the earth and with each other rather than in an individual identity. Aspects of the earth are offered up for both the author and the reader’s delight, creating an infectiously communal atmosphere to get lost in throughout the book.
In an interview defeo did for Maudlin House, they describe carrying around 4 notebooks and using the notes app on their phone to basically take dictation from whatever the earth and their experience in it is saying. And the poems themselves have this very carefully-culled-from-experience feel to them, with choice descriptions melding into neologisms mixing with the genuine and affecting interactions one can have with nature.
Besides how rigorously each poem is wrought, the flow in this book is also unparalleled. It goes from scene to scene without skipping a beat, the uncapitalized onrush of words hitting you but nicely, like wisps of dandelion fuzz hitting your cheek. Each poem is crafted like a totem to carry with you through the rest of the poems, which functions as a nice parallel to our experiences in life and is mirrored by defeo’s stated love of rocks and carrying rocks.
Whether someone’s care is understated or overstated is irrelevant to the fact that they care, and in this book, defeo plays with either understating that care through grammar and syntax or overstating that same care through diction. Through Twittercore sentimentalism, they are trying to tell you that life can be affirmed not through simple affirmations of it but instead through injunctions to live it in real time. There are 44 smiley faces total in and on the book, and defeo wants you to feel each one as if it is received by you at the worst time of your life, as if you need all 44 to keep going. This book is that serious; smiley faces are that serious.
It takes a bus ride to read this book. But, as long as there are more buses and more trains and more destinations, it would be wise to take defeo along as a companion because of their wisdom and strength. There’s no comma between “i love you” and “here’s a gigantic worm” because the act of giving requires no grammatical foreplay; it simply is and does. If you doubt that, then go read this book and learn for yourself hermeneutically and spiritually. Or just smile and realize that that too is a legitimate form of coping with this world we find ourselves in.
Blake Wallin is the author of the chapbooks Otherwise Jesus (Ghost City Press, 2015) and No Sign on the Island (Bottlecap Press, 2016) as well as the microchap The Lucidity of Giving Up (Ghost City Press, 2016). He is the Reviews/Interviews Editor for Ghost City Review.